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Covid-19 & Broccoli (and other weird research)

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Lani
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Covid-19 & Broccoli (and other weird research)

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Post by Lani »

Question What is the association between the bitter taste receptor phenotype and outcomes after infection with SARS-CoV-2?

Findings In this cohort study of 1935 adults, 266 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, and those who experienced low intensity of bitter tastes or no bitter tastes (nontasters) were significantly more likely to test positive for SARS-CoV-2, to be hospitalized, and to be symptomatic for a longer duration. Conversely, those who experienced greater intensity of bitter tastes (supertasters) represented 5.6% of patients infected with SARS-CoV-2, suggesting enhanced innate immune protection.

Meaning This study suggests that bitter taste receptor allelic variants are associated with innate immune fitness toward SARS-CoV-2 and can be used to correlate with clinical course and prognosis of COVID-19.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamane ... ct/2780134
If you can't stand broccoli, celery or kale, you may be a supertaster, and it just might protect you from COVID-19.

Supertasters are folks who are highly sensitive to bitterness. They're not only less likely to get COVID-19 than people who aren't so sensitive to sharp, pungent flavors, they're also less likely to wind up hospitalized with it, researchers said.

What's more, supertasters in a new study experienced COVID-19 symptoms for only about five days, compared with an average 23 days among non-tasters.
:snippity:
"If you are unable to taste bitterness, you should be that much more careful and wear masks for a longer duration to protect yourself from COVID-19," Hirsch said. Unfortunately, he added, most people don't know which type of taster they are.

Home- and office-based tests can tell you where you fit on the taste spectrum. But here's an easier option: "If celery tastes bitter to you," Hirsch said, "you're a supertaster, and if it doesn't, be careful."
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-05- ... covid.html

There is also an article about supertasters here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... 48368741AA
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MN-Skeptic
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Covid-19 & Broccoli (and other weird research)

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Post by MN-Skeptic »

I wasn't quite sure where to post this tweet, but decided it fits in this thread. Basically, Yankee Candle ended up with poor reviews as the pandemic began and people complained that their candles had weak scents. It even got to the point where a researcher looked into the connection between an increase in bad reviews with current increases in Covid -



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Covid-19 & Broccoli (and other weird research)

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Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/19388
Vol. 16 (2022): Proceedings of the Sixteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media / Poster Papers
“This Candle Has No Smell”: Detecting the Effect of COVID Anosmia on Amazon Reviews Using Bayesian Vector Autoregression


Keywords: Measuring predictability of real world phenomena based on social media, e.g., spanning politics, finance, and health, Trend identification and tracking; time series forecasting, Subjectivity in textual data; sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction, linguistic analyses of social media behavior, Qualitative and quantitative studies of social media

Abstract

While there have been many efforts to monitor or predict Covid using digital traces such as social media, one of the most distinctive and diagnostically important symptoms of Covid -- anosmia, or loss of smell -- remains elusive due to the infrequency of discussions of smell online. It was recently hypothesized that an inadvertent indicator of this key symptom may be misplaced complaints in Amazon reviews that scented products such as candles have no smell. This paper presents a novel Bayesian vector autoregression model developed to test this hypothesis, finding that "no smell" reviews do indeed reflect changes in US Covid cases even when controlling for the seasonality of those reviews. A series of robustness checks suggests that this effect is also seen in perfume reviews, but did not hold for the flu prior to Covid. These results suggest that inadvertent digital traces may be an important tool for tracking epidemics.
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Covid-19 & Broccoli (and other weird research)

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Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-n ... -rcna51877
Babies born during the pandemic may have delayed communication skills
Fewer 1-year-olds who were born in 2020 could point, say a full word or wave goodbye than infants born before the pandemic, a study found.


Before Covid hit, parents commonly observed infants pointing at objects by 9 months old. By 1 year, many babies were saying their first words.

But the new study, published Tuesday by researchers at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, Ireland, found that Irish infants born from March to May 2020 had a harder time communicating at 1 year old than those born between 2008 and 2011 had.

Around 89% of the infants studied who were born between 2008 and 2011 could articulate a full word like "bowl" or "cup" at 12 months old, compared to around 77% of infants born during the early months of the pandemic. The share of infants who could point at objects fell from 93% to 84%, and the portion who could wave goodbye fell from 94% to 88%.

The results were based on a questionnaire given to parents of 309 babies in Ireland during the pandemic. Around each infant's first birthday, their parents were asked whether the baby could perform 10 different tasks, such as standing up or stacking bricks. The researchers then compared those results to a longitudinal study that assessed the same 10 skills between 2008 and 2011. Both groups of parents were asked to complete the surveys as close to their child’s birthday as possible.
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"Mickey Mouse and I grew up together." - Ruthie Tompson, Disney animation checker and scene planner and one of the first women to become a member of the International Photographers Union in 1952.
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